The project

Background:

Electrical Power and Energy Systems (EPES) have today many vulnerabilities due to technical factors (faults, voltage and frequency fluctuations, intermittent generation, etc.) or human factors (operational errors, accidental events, or malicious behaviours).

Extreme weather events are becoming progressively more frequent, even in areas where in the past they used to occur very rarely. The magnitude and recurrence of blackouts due to extreme weather events and consequent severe damages to people and the economy is already a weak point of the electrical infrastructures.

As a matter of fact, the climate emergency and severe weather are stressing power grids in a moment when climate policies are increasing the role of electrification in transportation, heating, and the increasing of distributed resources.

But also, a wide range of new risks related to cybersecurity and cyber threats can exploit to gain access to critical infrastructure.

These factors require a deep reflection on the criteria adopted in the operation and maintenance of power systems, and in the organisation of the recovery before and after a disruptive event.


Goal of the project:

Through the demonstration and integration of the innovative solutions provided by R2D2, it will be possible to achieve a more secure, reliable and resilient energy system in Europe, making a positive and tangible impact throughout the European EPES value chain.


Expected results:

  1. To assess vulnerabilities and threats of the system in a collaborative manner
  2. To define resiliency-oriented design principles with a set of common requirements to inherently secure EPES.
  3. To design adequate security measures to ensure a cyber-resilient system and describing the advantages of the solutions adopted compared to others.
  4. To implement both organisational procedures and operational strategies to test the resilience of the system with different types of attacks/severity.
  5. To develop security information and event management system to collect logs for analysis and information sharing across operators.
  6. To improve the reliability and security of physical assets through the combination of image processing and AI tools.
  7. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the measures with a cost-benefit analysis.
  8. To speed up the restoration and reparation of the grid affected by severe weather events, through the prioritization of the components to repair, and the optimal allocation of human and equipment resources.
  9. To formulate recommendations for standardisation and policy in (cyber)resiliency at component, system and process level.

Products:

R2D2 deploys four tools dedicated to the prevention, protection and restoration of EPES in two different independent but complementary scenarios in the energy value-chain – from regional coordination between TSOs, to privacy of LV customers. The project builds on top of strong energy coordination actions in South-East Europe (SEE), following EU legislation and in alignment with the recent activities promoted by ENTSO-E about cyber-security in transmission systems.

R2D2 delivers a palette of complementary solutions synthesised into four Products:

C3PO - Multi-risk assessment framework for power system

  • Goal: contributing to a systematic, disciplined, and repeatable approach for evaluating an energy system security strategy.
  • Beneficiaries: System Operators.

PRECOG - Prevention Systems For Energy Infrastructures Security

  • Goal: To provide a cybersecurity framework to Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT).
  • Beneficiaries: System Operators, IT consultants, electric industries and manufacturers.

IRIS - Resilience suite for TSO & DSO

  • Goal: intervenes when coordination between system operators is needed for security reasons.
  • Beneficiaries: System Operators and Regional Security and Coordination Centres.

EMMA - Enhanced Assets Maintenance And Management Toolkit

  • Goal: To contribute to the reliability of the physical assets and to expedite a faster grid recovery.
  • Beneficiaries: System operators, contractors, electric industries, and manufacturers.

Sites:

R2D2 results are tested and validated in 4 large-scale complementary demonstrators in Greece, Serbia, Spain and Slovenia involving representative and complete value chains, a wide variety of energy sources, networks, systems and assets, and spanning heterogeneous climatic, geographic and socioeconomic conditions which facilitate replicability, scale-up and eventual market launch. In this context and to effectively realize R2D2 demonstration cases, the consortium involves a variety of demonstration partners that ensure access to critical infrastructures for the project implementation. In the following paragraphs, such infrastructures are presented per demo site.


Expected impact:

R2D2 to achieve its challenging goals and therefore empower EPES across a wide set of events, from Low Impact High Frequent events (LIHF – reliability issues), to High Impact and Low Frequency (HILF resiliency issues) events and contribute to provide to the system the capability to resist and recover from a critical or emergency situation.

The adoption of R2D2 solution will allow to achieve better metrics in power supply, by reducing the frequency and the duration of the interruptions  and improving the overall service availability . Not only the system operator will take advantage of the improvement in the reliability indexes, but also final customers will benefit of a power supply with higher standards of supply’s security and availability and reducing the average restoration time -after a critical event.

Regarding the cyber-resilience of EPES, R2D2 will contribute to the reduction of the Mean Time to Detect and Resolve a cyber-security issue, and to improve the capacity to detect an attack towards new components integrated in the grid improved. Thanks to the prediction of a critical events and to the capability to propose alternative strategies to minimize risks and impacts, the Restoration time of a damaged/attacked component it is expected to sensibly reduce.

Finally, R2D2 will take care to secure the communications exchanged across system operators (TSO-TSO and TSO-DSO) to prevent or contrast an emergency and solving security constraints or resorbing potential inadequacy.

Partners